Posted by: M. Murcek ||
10/06/2007 13:54 Comments ||
Top||
#2
It wasn't his fault. It was because of the conservatives and Republicans. He had to do it:
Lawrence struggled to fit in in the heavily military, heavily Republican world of San Diego. He loved to tell friends that he had three strikes against him: he was a liberal, a Jew, a Democrat.
#5
Joe is a strong-on-defense stud. M. Larry Lawrence was a Clinton Weenie, a blight on San Diego, and I'm glad they dug his lying ass out of Arlington. I remember they had big tents to shelter his relatives from the TV news choppers. The humiliation was delicious
Posted by: Frank G ||
10/06/2007 16:24 Comments ||
Top||
#2
True soldiers enjoy the rush of battle. I can understand why some people crave being in the thick of armed conflict. We need them. We should devise rules of engagement that advance their survival.
#3
Sorry, I couldn't get past the first page. Ya pays yer money and ya takes yer chances. My best friend in high school was killed on a motorcycle before he graduated. He didn't even get a chance to try to change the world. Do you think the folks at Honda worroed about it?
Posted by: Bobby ||
10/06/2007 7:54 Comments ||
Top||
#4
...worried about it? Preview is your friend, but only if you use it after you add one more thought.
Posted by: Bobby ||
10/06/2007 7:55 Comments ||
Top||
#5
Bobby, you have bigger problems to deal with than your spelling.
It's not about Hitchens or Daily. It's about ourselves. The mourning for 'Diana' was one big narcissistic declaration about some people's dreams. The dream died. The obit for Daily was about affirming the fundamental core of who we are. That lives.
I thought, Well, here we are to perform the last honors for a warrior and hero, and there are no hysterical ululations, no shrieks for revenge, no insults hurled at the enemy, no firing into the air or bogus hysterics. Instead, an honest, brave, modest family is doing its private best. I hope no fanatical fool could ever mistake this for weakness. It is, instead, a very particular kind of strength. If America can spontaneously produce young men like Mark, and occasions like this one, it has a real homeland security instead of a bureaucratic one. To borrow some words of George Orwell's when he first saw revolutionary Barcelona, "I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for."
#8
Two words come to mind whenever I read an article like this.
Can't lose.
A country that produces citizens like Mark hundreds of thousands of times over can't lose.
America. Can't. Lose.
Posted by: Mike N. ||
10/06/2007 12:57 Comments ||
Top||
#9
Perhaps I missed the point, of got up on the wrong side of the computer this morning.
Oh, and Excalibur - thanks for your insightful comment. I'll try to improve.
Posted by: Bobby ||
10/06/2007 13:03 Comments ||
Top||
#10
Well said, Mike N. Bobby dear, we all have our moments, but we know you're one of the good guys. Go take the lovely Mrs. Bobby for a walk or shopping or something, and come back refreshed.
#12
Each time I saw a friend "buy the farm" or knew of a fellow flier that had strapped on his last F-4, I knew that they were part of a special breed. Some at risk for love of country. Some for an undefineable sense of duty. Some for the love of flying and, yup, even for a check (so they said). But these bright eyed, death defiers, could have been or done anything they wanted but they chose to serve. Shed not a tear of sorrow or harbor an ounce of regret Mr. Hitchens, you simply stirred the sleeping soul of an American. As long as we have the Lt. Dailys of the world we can sleep safely at night. You are both in my prayers as I sleep soundly tonight.
Posted by: Total War ||
10/06/2007 14:51 Comments ||
Top||
#13
Thanks, TW. I did read it all, and it's way better than I thought.
Posted by: Bobby ||
10/06/2007 17:34 Comments ||
Top||
#1
Pledge of Non-Participation in Aiding Non-Pariticpants.
When anthropologists find themselves kidnapped in third-world hell-holes, we pledge not to intervene in any way, nor to allow others to do so either. We would not want to interfere with your understanding of their 'culture'.
#2
Amusingly stupid given that murderous dictators, thugs and tyrants, sorry, I mean "militants and insurgents" are usually engaged in mass slaughter of unique indigenous populations that anthropologists would be studying if they were not busy writing junior high school manifestos.
Pakistan is best avoided in August, when the rains come and transform the plains into a huge steam bath. When I lived there we fled to the mountains, but this year I stayed put. The real killer is the humidity. Relief arrives in short bursts: a sudden stillness followed by the darkening of the sky, thunderclaps like distant bombs and then the hard rain. Rivers and tributaries quickly overflow; flash floods make cities impassable. Sewage runs through slums and posh neighbourhoods alike. Even if you go straight from air-conditioned room to air-conditioned car you cant completely escape the smell. In August sixty years ago, Pakistan was separated from the subcontinent. This summer, as power appeared to be draining away from Pervez Musharraf, the countrys fourth military dictator, it was instructive to observe the process at first hand.
Disillusionment and resentment are widespread. Cultivating anti-Indian/anti-Hindu feeling, in an attempt to encourage national cohesion, no longer works. The celebrations marking the anniversary of independence on 14 August are more artificial and irritating than ever. A cacophony of meaningless slogans that impress nobody, countless clichés in newspaper supplements competing for space with stale photographs of the Founder (Muhammad Ali Jinnah) and the Poet (Iqbal). Banal panel discussions remind us of what Jinnah said or didnt say. The perfidious Lord Mountbatten and his promiscuous wife, Edwina, are denounced for favouring India when it came to the division of the spoils. Its true, but we cant blame them for the wreck Pakistan has become. In private, of course, there is much soul-searching, and a surprising collection of people now feel the state should never have been founded.
Several years after the split with Bangladesh in 1971 I wrote a book called Can Pakistan Survive? for Penguin. It was publicly denounced and banned by the dictator of the day, General Zia-ul-Haq, but pirated in many editions. I had argued that if the state carried on in the same old way, some of the minority provinces left behind might also defect, leaving the Punjab alone, strutting like a cock on a dunghill. Many of those who denounced me as a traitor and a renegade are now asking the same question. Its too late for regrets, I tell them. The country is here to stay. And its not religion or the mystical ideology of Pakistan that guarantees its survival, but its nuclear capacity and Washington.
On the countrys 60th birthday (as on its 20th and 30th anniversaries), an embattled military regime is fighting for its survival. There is a war on its western frontier, while at home it is being tormented by jihadis and judges. None of this seemed to make much difference to the young men on motorbikes who took over the streets of Lahore in their annual suicide race. It seems the only thing worth celebrating is the right to die. Only five managed it this year, a much lower figure than in the previous five years. Maybe this is a rational way to mark a conflict in which more than a million people hacked each other to death as the decaying British Empire prepared to scuttle off home. On the eve of Partition a cabinet meeting in London was devoted to the growing crisis in India. The minutes reported: Mr Jinnah was very bitter and determined. He seemed to the secretary of state like a man who knew that he was going to be killed and therefore insisted on committing suicide to avoid it. He was not alone.
Now yet another uniformed despot was taking the salute at a military parade to mark independence day in Islamabad, mouthing a bad speech written by a bored bureaucrat that failed to stifle the yawns of the surrounding sycophants. Even the F-16s in proud formation failed to excite the audience. Flags were waved by schoolchildren, a band played the national anthem, the whole show was broadcast live and then it was over.
The European and North American papers give the impression that the main, if not the only, problem confronting Pakistan is the power of the bearded fanatics skulking in the Hindu Kush, who as the papers see it are on the verge of taking over the country. In this account, all that stops a jihadi finger finding the nuclear trigger is Musharraf. Alas, it now seems he might drown in a sea of troubles and so the helpful State Department has pushed out an over-inflated raft in the shape of Benazir Bhutto.
In fact, the threat of a jihadi takeover of Pakistan is remote. There is no possibility of a takeover by religious extremists unless the army wants one, as in the 1980s, when General Zia-ul-Haq handed over the Ministries of Education and Information to the Jamaat-e-Islami, with dire results. There are serious problems confronting Pakistan, but these are usually ignored in Washington, by both the administration and the financial institutions. The lack of a basic social infrastructure encourages hopelessness and despair, but only a tiny minority turns to jihad.
During periods of military rule in Pakistan three groups get together: military leaders, a corrupt claque of fixer-politicians, and businessmen eyeing juicy contracts or state-owned land. The countrys ruling elite has spent the last sixty years defending its ill-gotten wealth and privilege, and the Supreme Leader (uniformed or not) is invariably intoxicated by their flattery. Corruption envelops Pakistan. The poor bear the burden, but the middle classes are also affected. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, small businessmen, traders are crippled by a system in which patronage and bribery are trump cards. Some escape there are 20,000 Pakistani doctors working in the United States alone but others come to terms with the system, accept compromises that make them deeply cynical about themselves and everyone else.
The resulting moral vacuum is filled by porn films and religiosity of various sorts. In some areas religion and pornography go together: the highest sales of porn videos are in Peshawar and Quetta, strongholds of the religious parties. Taliban leaders in Pakistan target video shops, but the dealers merely go underground. Nor should it be imagined that the bulk of the porn comes from the West. There is a thriving clandestine industry in Pakistan, with its own local stars, male and female.
Meanwhile the Islamists are busy picking up supporters. The persistent and ruthless missionaries of Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) are especially effective. Sinners from every social group, desperate for purification, queue to join. TJ headquarters in Pakistan are situated in a large mission in Raiwind. Once a tiny village surrounded by fields of wheat, corn and mustard seed, it is now a fashionable suburb of Lahore, where the Sharif brothers built a Gulf-style palace when they were in power in the 1990s. The TJ was founded in the 1920s by Maulana Ilyas, a cleric who trained at the orthodox Sunni seminary in Deoband, in Uttar Pradesh. At first, its missionaries were concentrated in Northern India, but today there are large groups in North America and Western Europe. The TJ hopes to get planning permission to build a mosque in East London next to the Olympic site. It would be the largest mosque in Europe. In Pakistan, TJ influence is widespread. Penetrating the national cricket team has been its most conspicuous success: Inzamam-ul-Haq and Mohammed Yousuf are activists for the cause at home while Mushtaq Ahmet works hard in their interest in Britain. Another triumph was the post-9/11 recruitment of Junaid Jamshed, the charismatic lead singer of Pakistans first successful pop group, Vital Signs. He renounced his past and now sings only devotional songs naats.
The Tablighis stress their non-violence and insist they are there merely to broadcast the true faith in order to help people find the correct path in life. This may be so, but it is clear that some younger male recruits, bored with all the dogma, ceremonies and ritual, are more interested in getting their hands on a Kalashnikov. Many believe that the Tablighi missionary camps are fertile recruiting grounds for armed groups active on the Western Frontier and in Kashmir.
The establishment has been slow to challenge the interpretation of Islam put forward by groups such as Tablighi. Musharraf advised people to go and see Khuda Kay Liye (In the Name of God), a new movie directed by Shoaib Mansoor (who wrote and produced some of Vital Signs most successful music). This may not help the film, or the moderate Islam it favours, given that Musharrafs popularity ratings currently trail Osama bin Ladens, according to a recent poll, but I went to a matinee performance in Lahore and the cinema was packed with young people. The film is well intentioned, also long-winded and crude. It has, however, had an impact. At least it tries out a few ideas, which is unheard of in a country where the film industry produces nothing but Bollywood-style dross, even if the ideas are limited to the good Muslim, bad Muslim stereotype. Jihadi violence is bad. Music is good and not anti-Islamic. Violence and rape in the badlands of the Pakistan-Afghan frontier are intercut with scenes in a post-9/11 United States, where an innocent Pakistani musician is lifted by intelligence operatives and tortured (these scenes go on far too long). The implication is that each side feeds on the other. It is a prim film and the row of youths sitting behind me clearly wanted some more action on the sex front. When a white female student in Chicago gives the Pakistani musician a present, one of them commented: Shes giving him her phone number. If the ushers hadnt told the youths to keep quiet I might have enjoyed the film more.
One of the main threats to Musharrafs authority is the countrys judiciary. On 9 March, Musharraf suspended Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, pending an investigation. The accusations against him were contained in a letter from Naeem Bokhari, a Supreme Court advocate. Curiously, the letter was widely circulated I received a copy via email. I wondered whether something was afoot, but decided the letter was just sour grapes. Not so: it was part of a plan. After a few personal complaints, extravagant rhetoric took over:
My Lord, the dignity of lawyers is consistently being violated by you. We are treated harshly, rudely, brusquely and nastily. We are not heard. We are not allowed to present our case. There is little scope for advocacy. The words used in the Bar Room for Court No. 1 are the slaughter house. We are cowed down by aggression from the Bench, led by you. All we receive from you is arrogance, aggression and belligerence.
The following passage should have alerted me to what was really going on:
I am pained at the wide publicity to cases taken up by My Lord in the Supreme Court under the banner of Fundamental Rights. The proceedings before the Supreme Court can conveniently and easily be referred to the District and Sessions Judges. I am further pained by the media coverage of the Supreme Court on the recovery of a female. In the Bar Room, this is referred to as a media circus.
The chief justice was beginning to embarrass the regime. He had found against the government on a number of key issues, including the rushed privatisation of the Pakistan Steel Mills in Karachi, a pet project of Prime Minister Shaukat (Shortcut) Aziz. The case was reminiscent of Yeltsins Russia. Economists had estimated that the industry was worth $5 billion. Seventy-five per cent of the shares were sold for $362 million in a 30-minute auction to a friendly consortium consisting of Arif Habib Securities (Pakistan), al-Tuwairqi (Saudi Arabia) and the Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works Open JSC (Russia). The privatisation wasnt popular with the military, and the retiring chairman, Haq Nawaz Akhtar, complained that the plant could have fetched more money if it were sold as scrap. The general perception was that the president and prime minister had helped out their friends. A frequenter of the Stock Exchange told me in Karachi that Arif Habib Securities (which owns 20 per cent) was set up as a front company for Shaukat Aziz. The Saudi steel giant (40 per cent) is reputedly on very friendly terms with Musharraf, who turned up to open a steel factory set up by the group on 220 acres of land rented from the adjoining Pakistan Steel Mills. Now they own it all.
After the Supreme Court insisted that disappeared political activists be produced in court and refused to dismiss rape cases, there were worries in Islamabad that the chief justice might even declare the military presidency unconstitutional. Paranoia set in. Measures had to be taken. The general and his cabinet decided to frighten Chaudhry by suspending him. The chief justice was kept in solitary confinement for several hours, manhandled by intelligence operatives, and traduced on state television. But instead of caving in and accepting a generous resignation settlement, the judge insisted on defending himself, triggering a remarkable movement in defence of an independent judiciary. This is surprising. Pakistani judges are notoriously conservative and have legitimised every coup with a bogus doctrine of necessity ruling (although some did refuse to swear an oath of loyalty to Musharraf).
When I visited Pakistan in April the protests were getting bigger every day. Initially confined to the countrys 80,000 lawyers and several dozen judges, unrest soon spread beyond them, which was unusual in a country whose people have become increasingly alienated from elite rule. But the lawyers were marching in defence of the constitutional separation of powers. There was something delightfully old-fashioned about this struggle: it involved neither money nor religion, but principle. Careerists from the opposition (some of whom had organised thuggish assaults on the Supreme Court when in power) tried to make the cause their own. Dont imagine theyve all suddenly changed, Abid Hasan Manto, one of the countrys most respected lawyers, told me. On the other hand, when the time comes almost anything can act as a spark.
It soon became obvious to most people in the Islamabad bureaucracy that they had made a gigantic blunder. But as often happens in a crisis, instead of acknowledging this and moving to correct it, the perpetrators decided on a show of strength. The first targets were independent TV channels. In Karachi and other cities in the south three channels suddenly went dark as they were screening reports on the demonstrations. There was popular outrage. On 5 May Chaudhry drove from Islamabad to give a speech in Lahore, stopping at every town en route to meet supporters; it took 26 hours to complete a journey that should take four or five. In Islamabad they plotted a counter-strike.
The judge was due to visit Karachi, the countrys largest city, on 12 May. Political power here rests in the hands of the MQM (Muttahida Qaumi Movement/United National Movement), an unsavoury outfit created during a previous dictatorship and notorious for its involvement in protection rackets and other kinds of violence. It has supported Musharraf loyally through every crisis. Its leader, Altaf Hussain, guides the movement from a safe perch in London, fearful of retribution from his many opponents were he to return. In a video address to his followers in Karachi he said: If conspiracies are hatched to end the present democratically elected government then each and every worker of MQM . . . will stand firm and defend the democratic government. It was typical of him. On Islamabads instructions, the MQM leaders decided to prevent the judge addressing the meeting in Karachi. He was not allowed to leave the airport. His supporters in different parts of the city were assaulted. Almost fifty people were killed. After footage of the violence was screened on Aaj TV, the station was attacked by armed MQM volunteers, who shot at the building for six whole hours and set cars in the parking lot on fire.
The management of the TV station mysteriously failed to reach senior police officers, the chief minister or the governor. People understood why, and a successful general strike followed, which further isolated the regime. A devastating report, Carnage in Karachi, published in August by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, confirmed in great detail what everyone already knew: the police and army had been ordered to stand by while armed MQM members went on the rampage.
Musharraf, trying desperately to keep a grip on the country, had no alternative but to sound the retreat. The chief justices appeal against his suspension was finally admitted and heard by the Supreme Court. On 20 July a unanimous decision was made to reinstate him, and shamefaced government lawyers were seen leaving the precinct in a hurry. A reinvigorated court got down to business. Hafiz Abdul Basit was a disappeared prisoner accused of terrorism. The chief justice summoned Tariq Pervez, the director-general of Pakistans Federal Investigation Agency, and asked him politely where the prisoner was being kept. Pervez replied that he had no idea and had never heard of Basit. The chief justice instructed the police chief to produce Basit in court within 48 hours: Either produce the detainee or get ready to go to jail. Two days later Basit was produced and then released, after the police failed to present any substantial evidence against him. Washington and London were not happy. They were convinced that Basit was a terrorist who should have been kept in prison indefinitely, as he certainly would have been in Britain or the US.
The Supreme Court is currently considering six petitions challenging Musharrafs decision to contest the presidency without relinquishing his command of the army. There is much nervousness in Islamabad. The presidents supporters are threatening dire consequences if the court rules against him. But to declare a state of emergency would require the support of the army, and I was told that informal soundings had revealed a reluctance to intervene on the part of the generals. Their polite excuse was that they were too heavily committed to the war on terror to be able to preserve law and order in the cities.
As the judicial crisis temporarily ended, a more sombre one loomed. Most of todays jihadi groups are the mongrel offspring of Pakistani and Western intelligence outfits, born in the 1980s when General Zia was in power and waging the Wests war against the godless Russians, who were then occupying Afghanistan. That is when state patronage of Islamist groups began. One cleric who benefited was Maulana Abdullah, who was allotted land to build a madrassa in the heart of Islamabad, not far from the government buildings. Soon the area was increased so that two separate facilities (for male and female students) could be constructed, together with an enlarged Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque. State money was provided for all this, and the government is the technical owner of the property.
During the 1980s and 1990s this complex became a transit camp for young jihadis on their way to fight in Afghanistan and, later, Kashmir. Abdullah made no secret of his beliefs. He was sympathetic to the Saudi-Wahhabi interpretation of Islam and during the Iraq-Iran war was only too happy to encourage the killing of Shia heretics in Pakistan. It was his patronage of ultra-sectarian, anti-Shia terror groups that led to his assassination in October 1998. Members of a rival Muslim faction killed him soon after he had finished praying in his own mosque.
His sons, Abdul Rashid Ghazi and Abdul Aziz, then took control of the mosque and religious schools. The government agreed that Aziz would lead the Friday congregation and preach the weekly sermon after Friday prayers. His sermons were often supportive of al-Qaida, though he was more careful about his language after 9/11. Senior civil servants and military officers often attended Friday prayers. The better-educated and soft-spoken Rashid, with his lean, haggard face and ragged beard, was left to act as spin-doctor. He was wheeled on to charm visiting foreign or local journalists, and did it well.
But after November 2004, when the army, under heavy US pressure, launched an offensive in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, relations between the brothers and the government became tense. Aziz in particular was livid. He might not have done anything about it, but, according to Rashid, a retired colonel of the Pakistan Army approached us with a written request for a fatwa clarifying the Sharia perspective on the army waging a war on the tribal people. Aziz did not waste any time. He issued a fatwa declaring that the killing of its own people by a Muslim army is haram (forbidden), that any army official killed during the operation should not be given a Muslim burial and that the militants who die while fighting the Pakistan Army are martyrs. Within days of its publication the fatwa had been publicly endorsed by almost five hundred religious scholars. Despite heavy pressure from the mosques patrons in the ISI, Pakistans military intelligence, the brothers refused to withdraw the fatwa. The government response was surprisingly muted. Azizs official status as the mosques imam was ended and an arrest warrant issued against him, but it was never served and the brothers were allowed to carry on as usual. Perhaps the ISI thought they might still prove useful.
Earlier that year the government claimed it had uncovered a terrorist plot to bomb military installations, including the GHQ and other state buildings, on 14 August. Machine-guns and explosives were found in Abdul Rashid Ghazis car. New warrants were issued against the brothers and they were arrested. At this point, the religious affairs minister, Ijaz-ul-Haq, General Zias son, persuaded his colleagues to pardon the clerics in return for a written apology pledging that they wouldnt become involved in the armed struggle. Rashid claimed the whole plot had been scripted to please the West and in a newspaper article asked the religious affairs minister to provide proof that he had given the undertaking the minister had supposedly asked for. There was no response.
In January this year, the brothers decided to shift their focus from foreign to domestic policy and demanded an immediate implementation of Sharia law. Until then they had been content to denounce US policies in the Muslim world and Americas local point-man Musharraf for helping dismantle the Taliban government in Afghanistan. They did not publicly support the three attempts made on Musharrafs life, but it was hardly a secret that they regretted his survival. The statement they issued in January was intended as an open provocation to the regime. Aziz spelled out his programme: We will never permit dance and music in Pakistan. All those interested in such activities should shift to India. We are tired of waiting. It is Sharia or martyrdom. They felt threatened by the governments demolition of two mosques that had been built illegally on public land. When they received notices announcing the demolition of parts of the Red Mosque and the womens seminary the brothers dispatched dozens of women students in black burqas to occupy a childrens library next to their seminary. The intelligence agencies appeared to be taken aback, but quickly negotiated an end to the occupation.
The brothers continued to test the authorities. Sharia was implemented and there was a public bonfire of books, CDs and DVDs. Then the women from the madrassa directed their fire against Islamabads up-market brothels, targeting Aunty Shamim, a well-known procuress who provided decent girls for indecent purposes, and whose clients included the local great and good (a number of them moderate religious leaders). Aunty ran the brothel like an office: she kept office hours and shut up shop at midday on Friday so that clients could go to the nearest mosque, which happened to be the Lal Masjid. The morality brigades raided the brothel and freed the women. Most of the girls were educated, some were single parents, others were widows, all were desperately short of funds. The office hours suited them. Aunty Shamim fled town, and her workers sought similar employment elsewhere, while the madrassa girls celebrated an easy victory.
Emboldened by their triumph, they decided to take on Islamabads posh massage parlours, not all of which were sex joints, and some of which were staffed by Chinese citizens. Six Chinese women were abducted in late June and taken to the mosque. The Chinese ambassador was not pleased. He informed President Hu Jintao, who was even less pleased, and Beijing made it clear that it wanted its citizens freed without delay. Government fixers arrived at the mosque to plead the strategic importance of Sino-Pakistan relations, and the women were released. The massage industry promised that henceforth only men would massage other men. Honour was satisfied, even though the deal directly contradicted the message of the Koran. The liberal press depicted the anti-vice campaign as the Talibanisation of Pakistan, which annoyed the Lal Masjid clerics. Rudy Giuliani, when he became mayor of New York, closed the brothels, Rashid said. Was that also Talibanisation?
Angered and embarrassed by the kidnapping of the Chinese women, Musharraf demanded a solution. The Saudi ambassador to Pakistan, Ali Saeed al-Awad Asseri, arrived at the mosque and spent ninety minutes with the brothers. They were welcoming but told him all they wanted was the implementation of Saudi laws in Pakistan. Surely he agreed? The ambassador declined to meet the press after the visit, so his response remains unrecorded. His mediation a failure, Plan B was set in motion.
On 3 July, the paramilitary Rangers began to lay barbed wire at the end of the street in front of the mosque. Some madrassa students opened fire, shot a Ranger dead, and for good measure torched the neighbouring Environment Ministry. Security forces responded the same night with tear gas and machine-guns. The next morning the government declared a curfew in the area and the week-long siege of the mosque began, with television networks beaming images across the world. Rashid must have been pleased. The brothers thought that keeping women and children hostage inside the compound might save them. But some were released and Aziz was arrested as he tried to escape in a burqa. On 10 July, paratroopers finally stormed the complex. Abdul Rashid Ghazi and at least a hundred others died in the ensuing clashes. Eleven soldiers were also killed and more than forty wounded. Several police stations were attacked and there were ominous complaints from the Tribal Areas. Maulana Faqir Mohammed, a leading Taliban supporter, told thousands of armed tribesmen: We beg Allah to destroy Musharraf and we will seek revenge for the Lal Masjid atrocities. This view was reiterated by Osama bin Laden, who declared Musharraf an infidel and said that removing him is now obligatory.
I was in Karachi in the last week of August, when suicide bombers hit military targets, among them a bus carrying ISI employees, to avenge Rashids death. In the country as a whole the reaction was muted. The leaders of the MMA, a coalition of religious parties that governs the Frontier province and shares power in Baluchistan, made ugly public statements, but took no action. Only a thousand people marched in the demonstration called in Peshawar the day after the deaths. This was the largest protest march, and even here the mood was subdued. There was no shrill glorification of the martyrs. The contrast with the campaign to reinstate the chief justice could not have been more pronounced. Three weeks later, more than 100,000 people gathered in the Punjabi city of Kasur to observe the 250th anniversary of the death of the great 17th-century poet Bulleh Shah, one in a distinguished line of Sufi poets who denounced organised religion and orthodoxy. For him a mullah could be compared to a barking dog or a crowing cock.
The fact is that jihadis are not popular in most of Pakistan, but neither is the government. The Red Mosque episode raised too many unanswered questions. Why did the government not act in January? How did the clerics manage to accumulate such a large store of weapons without the knowledge of the government? Was the ISI aware that an arsenal was concealed inside the mosque? If so, why did they keep quiet? What was the relationship between the clerics and government agencies? Why was Aziz released and allowed to return to his village without being charged? Has the state decided to relinquish its monopoly of violence?
A lot of this has to do with Afghanistan. The failure of the Nato occupation has revived the Taliban as well as the trade in heroin and has destabilised north-western Pakistan. Indiscriminate bombing raids by US planes have killed too many innocent civilians, and the culture of revenge remains strong in the region. The corruption and cronyism of the Karzai government have alienated many Afghans, who welcomed the toppling of Mullah Omar and hoped for better times. Instead, they have witnessed land-grabs and the construction of luxury villas by Karzais colleagues. And there are persistent rumours that Karzais younger brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai, has become one of the biggest drug barons in the country. The Pashtun tribes have never recognised the Durand Line, the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan imposed by the British. And so when guerrillas flee to the tribal areas under Pakistani control they are not handed over to Islamabad, but fed and clothed till they go back to Afghanistan or are protected like the al-Qaida leaders. Washington feels that Musharrafs deals with tribal elders border on capitulation to the Taliban and is angry because Pakistani military actions are paid for by the US and they feel they arent getting value for money. This is not to mention the $10 billion Pakistan has received since 9/11 for signing up to the war on terror.
The problem is that some elements in Pakistani military intelligence feel that they will be able to take Afghanistan back once Operation Enduring Freedom has come to an end. For this reason they refuse to give up their links with the guerrilla leaders. They even think that the US might one day favour such a policy. I doubt whether this could happen: Iranian influence is strong in Herat and western Afghanistan; the Northern Alliance receives weapons from Russia and India is the major regional power. A stable settlement will have to include a regional guarantee of Afghan stability and the formation of a national government after Nato withdrawal.
Even if Washington accepted a cleaned-up version of the Taliban, the other countries involved would not, and a new set of civil conflicts could only lead to disintegration. Were this to happen, the Pashtuns on both sides of the Durand Line might opt to create their own state. It sounds far-fetched today, but what if the confederation of tribes that is Afghanistan were to split up into statelets, each under the protection of a larger power?
Back in the heart of Pakistan the most difficult and explosive issue remains social and economic inequality. This is not unrelated to the increase in the number of madrassas. If there were a half-decent state education system, poor families might not feel the need to hand over a son or daughter to the clerics in the hope that at least one child will be clothed, fed and educated. Were there even the semblance of a health system many would be saved from illnesses contracted as a result of fatigue and poverty. No government since 1947 has done much to reduce inequality. The notion that the soon-to-return Benazir Bhutto, perched on Musharrafs shoulder, equals progress is as risible as Nawaz Sharif imagining that millions of people would turn out to receive him when he arrived at Islamabad airport last month. A general election is due later this year. If it is as comprehensively rigged as the last one was, the result will be increased alienation from the political process. The outlook is bleak. There is no serious political alternative to military rule.
I spent my last day in Karachi with fishermen in a village near Korangi creek. Shortcut Aziz has signed away the mangroves where shellfish and lobsters flourish, and land is being reclaimed to build Diamond City, Sugar City and other monstrosities on the Gulf model. The fishermen have been campaigning against these encroachments, but with little success. We need a tsunami, one of them half-joked. We talked about their living conditions. All we dream of is schools for our children, medicines and clinics in our villages, clean water and electricity in our homes, one woman said. Is that too much to ask for? Nobody even mentioned religion.
Posted by: john frum ||
10/06/2007 11:10 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[5 views]
Top|| File under:
An article by Tony Corn, who is currently writing a book on the Long War. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Paris and is a graduate of the U.S. Naval War College.
... Ever since the 1999 intervention in Kosovo, NATO has been eager to prove that it stands for more than No Action, Talk Only. But the adoption by the Alliance of the Marge Simpson doctrine (Are we gonna just stand there like the French, or are we gonna do something?) has proved to be no substitute for a new strategic concept. Kosovo itself, waged in no small part to maintain the credibility of the Alliance, ended up paradoxically weakening NATOs credibility and the mutual bad blood afterwards constituted the single most important underlying reason of the 2003 near-death experience over Iraq. .
Enlargement [of NATO] has been a bold move that played a critical (and often underappreciated) role in the successful transition to democracy of the former captive Europe, but for every action there is a reaction, and the gradual enlargement of NATO to the East has been the main cause of Russias gradual rapprochement with China. .
An astounding percentage of the allegedly sophisticated EU elites have the hardest time grasping what any American redneck knows intuitively: namely, that the collective threat to use force is still the best way to avoid having recourse to actual force. Fifty years of increasing focus on intra-EU politics has led EU elites to mistake multi-level governance (read: horse-trading by capitals in Brussels) for the whole of statecraft. .
Forget the Americans are from Mars, Europeans from Venus mantra that gave the Brussels Eurocracy the vapors in the summer of 2002. . Between the shock-and-awe slogans of the military Mars, and the human security fairy tales of the civilian Venus, Strategy in the West has been MIA for too long. Since the real Revolution in Strategic Affairs happens to be a non-Western affair, NATO leaders will have to start by learning the new grammar and logic of the kind of unrestricted warfare elaborated by the Chinese and the fourth-generation warfare practiced by Islamists. .
As U.S. NATO Ambassador Victoria Nuland argued, if the divisive debate over Iraq taught us one thing, it is that NATO must be the place where we talk about all the issues affecting our future the Middle East, Iraq, North Korea, China, Iran, just to name a few. The North Atlantic Council has recently broadened its range of consultations to include global issues ranging from energy security to transnational terrorism. . Enhancing the strategic literacy of NATOs stakeholders should be the logical prerequisite to a debate about the future NATO strategic concept.
In the past hundred years, the instrumentalization of Islam has been a recurrent temptation on the part of every rising power, be it Wilhemine Germany or Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, not to mention America itself. As the latest rising power, China itself would not be immune to that temptation even if it were energy self-sufficient. The fact that Chinas energy needs are huge guarantees that the constitution of a Sino-Islamic axis is for Beijing not just a tactical option, but a strategic necessity.
While the pivotal states of this strategy appear to be Pakistan, Iran, and (more recently) Saudi Arabia, the geopolitical situation of Iran puts it in a class by itself, as the most precious proxy in Chinas indirect approach against American primacy. It is therefore no surprise to learn that China is using Iran as a conduit for the delivery of arms to both Iraqi and Afghan insurgents, and providing Iran itself the kind of small boats needed to conduct attacks against commercial shipping or the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf. If the instrumentalization of Islam constitutes the geographical axis of Chinas grand strategy, the functional axis is or ought to be of equal interest to NATO .
Unlike China, Russia is energy self-sufficient; and unlike Chinas Confucianism, Russias Eurasianism actually comes in two opposite versions: one pro-West and anti-Islam; the other pro-Islam and anti-West. American Putin-bashers would do well to realize that the Putin regime clearly favors the former version which may not be the case for his successor. Putins Russia is a mystery wrapped in an enigma only for those caught in a 15-year time warp. In a nutshell: While Yelstins choice of an alleged Polish model of transition in 1992 resulted, by 1999, in 38 percent of the population living below the poverty line, Putins reorientation toward a Chinese model has since created an annual growth rate of 6 percent for Russia and a 70 percent approval rating for Putin. Having taken considerable domestic risks by siding with America after 9/11, Putin, for the past 5 years, has received nothing in return other than a seemingly endless enlargement of NATO in his own backyard. Now that Russia is rich with oil money and has paid its debts to the West, what Russia wants from the West is respect.
Russias nuisance capacity should not be underestimated . Unlike China, Russia is not a rising power. Russian hearts and mind are still up for grabs, though, and there are three reasons why it would be grossly irresponsible to alienate Russia gratuitously. In the short term, Russias support is critical to solve (militarily or not) the Iranian question; in the middle-term, Russia has considerable leverage over Europe . The current demonization of Russia in some American quarters is thus incomprehensible, unless one keeps in mind the particular conceit of democracies at war that Kennan, following Tocqueville, pointed out long ago: There is nothing in nature more egocentrical than the embattled democracy. It soon becomes the victim of its own propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision of everything else. . . . People who have got themselves into this frame of mind have little understanding for the issues of any contest other than the one in which they are involved.
This tunnel vision, and the incapacity to distinguish between the essential and the peripheral, is all the more surprising when it comes from the neoconservative side. Among the new generation of neocons, many seem to have forgotten the lessons of the older generation, as captured in Jeanne Kirkpatricks celebrated 1979 essay on Dictatorships and Double Standards. Simply put: when all is said and done, there is a difference in kind between totalitarianism and authoritarianism. If Islamist totalitarianism is the main enemy, as the neocons rightly claim, then it follows logically that Russian authoritarianism, however unpalatable to democratic sensibilities, is something we can live with. .
The wise American policy is to establish close relations with both Russia and China. And we should conduct it on the basis that whenever possible there should always be at least equal if not greater incentives or prospect of risks to cooperate with the United States than with each other. Similarly, a wise NATO policy should always make sure that NATO-Russia security cooperation is always stronger than Russia-China security cooperation. .
In the West itself, the current fixation of America on Central Asia and of Europe on the Middle East the closest thing to a Western geopolitical vision is based on two flawed premises. To put it crudely: Americans believe that Caspian Sea oil is the key to success in the Great Game; Europeans are convinced that the resolution of the Palestinian question holds the key to victory in the Long War.
Talk about intellectual sloppiness: Warnings about a Caspian mirage were already common among energy experts a decade ago, and time has only made them more relevant: The current fixation with the Caspian Basins alleged resource bonanza is exaggerating the regions commercial and strategic significance, distorting US foreign policy calculations and raising the risk of unnecessary contention with other actors, particularly Russia and Iran. . . . Russian analysts could be forgiven for construing US/NATO policies as encirclement from the West through open-ended NATO expansion. . . . The myth [of Central Asia and the Caucasus as a region of independent democracies buoyed by new-found oil wealth and part of an expanding Euro-Atlantic community] is diverting policy-makers from a far more profound geopolitical challenge to energy security in the twenty-first century: the rising dependence of Asian nations on Persian Gulf oil. . . . .
If American fixation on Central Asia is questionable, European fixation on the Palestinian question as the panacea of the Greater Middle East is downright irrational. . This European fixation is all the more irrational in that as far as the proverbial Arab Street is concerned, the resolution of the Palestinian question ranks only seventh in importance, way behind the usual bread-and-butter issues (employment, health, corruption, education, and even combating extremism and protecting civil rights). And who can blame Ali Six-Pack for his lack of interest? Unlike the Kurds, who have proven capable of self-government, Palestinian leaders have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, as the saying holds. The pathetic clash between Fatahland and Hamastan is today leading many Palestinians themselves to reconsider the long-abandoned possibility of forming a confederation with Jordan. It is time for Europeans to realize that, as Joseph Joffe demonstrated in a seminal article, far from creating tensions, Israel actually contains more antagonisms than it causes .
During World War II Spykman had challenged the centrality of the concept of the Heartland developed a generation earlier by Halford Mackinder (against Mahans sea power thesis), and focused instead on what he called the Rimland, by which he meant essentially continental countries with a maritime facade. the Rimland functions as a vast buffer zone of conflict between sea power and land power. Looking in both directions, it must function amphibiously and defend itself on land and sea. .
Todays Rimland is a 400-mile wide amphibious area. . this overpopulated Rimland, with 4 billion people living within 200-mile wide coastlands, is the epicenter of all conflicts. . As a military alliance, NATO cannot afford to ignore the increasing covergence of littoral warfare, amphibious warfare and urban warfare an issue to which the U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps are devoting increasing attention. .
Equally interesting is the other phenomenon happening on the new Rimland: the so-called territorialization of the seas. The belated implementation, in the 1990s, of the 1982 Law of the Sea (UNLOS) and in particular of the 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ), has had over time unintended effects. Due to the existence of more than one hundred EEZs, 32 percent of the ocean is today under some sort of national jurisdiction. .... The process of territorialization of the seas has been twofold: the enlarging of territorial waters from 12 miles to 200 miles, but also the deepening of territorialization. For all the post-Cold War talk about the decline of the state, there is at least one domain where the state is in expansion, and it is the sea. And for all the talk about a Great Game in Central Asia, it is worth keeping in mind that more than 30 percent of the worlds oil and 50 percent of the worlds natural gas is produced offshore. The .
For now, the Great Game at sea affects the Pacific more than the Atlantic, and as such has not directly affected NATO. But it certainly affects NATOs new global partners (Australia and Japan, Korea and New Zealand), who all happen to be maritime powers in the Pacific, and this is something that NATO will have to factor in when deciding the nature of its relationship with non-Atlantic powers. Global partnerships will have to be a two-way street, or there will be no global partnership. .
New perils, then, but also new promises. The maritime dimension is an opportunity for European allies to go beyond the EU sandbox and play a global role at relatively little cost, if only because public opinion will always find a maritime commitment more palatable than a continental one. For many allies like Norway and Greece, a greater maritime commitment on the part of NATO would also be a way to display niche capabilities (its not as if the U.S. Navy had a surplus of mine-sweepers) that they dont necessarily possess in land operations. Last but not least, for a country like France, a middle-sized power as a land power but a maritime superpower of sorts (the third largest EEZ in the world thanks to its South Pacific possessions), a greater maritime commitment would be a way to maintain a leadership position. .
Before the attack on the Twin Towers, the attack on the USS Cole gave the West an idea of what asymmetric warfare can accomplish (17 sailors killed and $250 million worth of repairs for a terrorist operation that cost $40,000 to launch). That asymmetric warfare at sea shows great promise has not been lost on the jihadists who, when all is said and done, are less interested in restoring a caliphate (a goal they know is beyond their reach) than in making the West bleed to death economically.
Nine million containers enter U.S. ports each year, and 80 percent of U.S. port facilities these days are owned by foreign companies. It is estimated that the detonation of a 10-to-20 kiloton nuclear weapon in a container would cause a disruption of trade valued at $100 billion to $300 billion, property damage of $50 billion to $500 billion, and the loss of 50,000 to 1 million lives. A mere dirty bomb smuggled in a container would kill very few people, but the disruption would cost $58 billion and it would take 19 days for ports to resume normal operations and 92 days to stabilize the container backlog by which time the disruption could well spawn a recession. .
Eighty percent of world trade travels by sea, and 60 percent of the worlds oil is shipped by about 4,000 tankers: .. A rogue nuclear missile on Paris or Berlin is decidedly more unlikely in the next five years than the hijacking and sinking of a couple of supertankers in the Strait of Gibraltar or the Bosphorus. The latter, in particular, is less than a mile wide in some areas, and 10 percent of the 50,000 ships that pass through it each year are tankers carrying Russian and Caspian oil.
In the Turkish strait in 1996, the nine pro-Chechen gunmen who hijacked a Turkish ferry and held 255 passengers hostage for three days had first considered the possibility of sabotaging one of the two suspension bridges with explosives to bring down the bridge and close shipping traffic. The worst case scenario, now that the Russian Duma has passed a bill to transport 20,000 tons of nuclear waste through the straits in the next ten years, is the possibility of one of these tankers being hijacked in the vicinity of Istanbul, a city of 12 million inhabitants. It is expected that traffic on the Bosphorus will be 50 percent higher in 2010 than it was in 2005, and so will the opportunities to create catastrophic mischief. .
There has been both a relative and an absolute decline of U.S. seapower, with a U.S. Navy today at its lowest level in the post-World War II era. For the first time in 20 years, the U.S. is in the process of drafting a new maritime strategy, but with a considerably reduced force that went from 600 to fewer than 300 ships, and with new responsibilities in terms of nonmilitary maritime security. Hence the concept of the Thousand Ship Navy, which is meant to create a global maritime partnership with foreign navies. TSN is much more than an attempt to make a virtue of necessity. .
NATO has gone global geographically (50,000 troops deployed now on three continents) and functionally (broadening of political consultations in the NAC). It is also beginning to go global in its cooperation with non-Atlantic partners like Japan to Australia. In some American and European quarters, this globalization of NATO has led some observers to assert rather boldly that NATOs next move must be to open its membership to any democratic state in the world that is willing and able to contribute to the fulfillment of NATOs new responsibilities. But to add four or five global partners is one thing, to add the 88 countries recognized as democracies by Freedom House is quite another.
The most cursory examination of twentieth-century history shows that transatlantic time lags have always been the rule rather than the exception. The First World War began in 1914, the U.S. only joined in 1917. The Second World War began in 1939, the U.S. only joined in 1942. The Cold War began in 1947, and it took Europe a full two years to give up the temptation of neutrality and side with the U.S. Since the Long War is of an asymmetric kind, it is no surprise if it took longer than usual for America and Europe to synchronize their chronopolitical watches. .
Posted by: Mike Sylwester ||
10/06/2007 10:36 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
In a rather stunning development, the Iraqi Islamic militant faction known as Asaeb al-Iraq al-Jihadiya (a.k.a. "the Iraqi Jihad Union") has issued a new statement dated October 5 suddenly accusing Al-Qaida's "Islamic State of Iraq" of deliberately killing its fighters in Diyala province and mutilating their bodies: "To make things worse, they dug up their bodies from the graves, further mutilated them, beheaded them, and showed them off from their vehicles while driving through the towns. [The ISI] even killed our mens wives and children."
Though this is actually the second time this week that similar charges have been leveled at Al-Qaida in Iraq by fellow Sunni insurgents, the source of the latest set of allegations--Asaeb al-Iraq al-Jihadiya--is most unusual. Less than three months ago, the very same organization was openly working in operational partnership with Al-Qaida, and was even rumored to be considering merging its forces with Al-Qaida's "Islamic State."
#1
Now, it appears that the Muslim world is adapting at last, pursuing innovative organizations, tactics and strategies, while brushing aside our insistence on the "laws of land warfare." We cling to the rules we know and value, while our enemies ignore them.
That's exactly what the Ottoman Empire did by refusing to adapt to new battlefield conventions as it slipped into its long decline and ultimate fall.
And leading the decline? Our COngressional Democrats, Harry and Nancy. spit.
Posted by: Bobby ||
10/06/2007 9:55 Comments ||
Top||
#2
In this new age of atavism and wars spawned by the most elementary human impulses religious fervor and ethnic supremacy we need to come to grips with the true roots of mass violence, that ecstatic phenomenon that serves the human-aggregate as the equivalent of the individual's sexual passion and release.
#3
This is why I advocate breaking up their fantasies with an information campaign that shows pictures of the dismembered, rotting bodies of jihadists, covered in flies and looking awful.
With literally thousands of photographs like that, and thumbnail pictures of the Mullahs and Imams who sent them to their deaths, if known, it would go a great length to ruin their fantasies of heaven and virgins and shit like that.
It should be mirrored all over the Internet, so anyone looking to find jihad-friendly sites would be bound to discover some iteration of it.
#4
I had suggested pretty much the same, Moose... a couple of years ago.
"And finally, show us and the Islamic world as a footnote, the remains of dead jihadis, bits and pieces of their gruesome dead bodies, all mixed in with bits of metal from suicide bombs, dead in the dirt like so much garbage, or shot down like a dog by an American sniper. . . Show how clear and inglorious is the modern jihad, shoveled into an unmarked, un-mourned grave. Throw it all back in their faces credited, and exhaustively footnoted every ugly boast, word and deed."
This either means that the username and password information in your wp-config.php file is incorrect or we can't contact the database server at localhost. This could mean your host's database server is down.
Are you sure you have the correct username and password?
Are you sure that you have typed the correct hostname?
Are you sure that the database server is running?
Posted by: Bobby ||
10/06/2007 17:40 Comments ||
Top||
#2
V-Dare's Blog must have bit the dust.
Here's Google's Cache
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
10/06/2007 18:19 Comments ||
Top||
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
